The InfiniBand Architecture (IBA) is an industry standard for inter-computer communication specified by the InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA). It emerged in 1999 as the joining of two competing proposals known as Next Generation I/O and Future Generation I/O. The InfiniBand Architecture provides high levels of reliability, performance, and scalability.
The InfiniBand Architecture spans several layers of the OSI model. It includes a physical layer, data-link layer, network layer, transport layer, and upper layers. The physical InfiniBand layer defines both the electrical and mechanical aspects of the InfiniBand Architecture including, cables, receptacles, and hot swap characteristics. The link layer encompasses packet layout, point-to-point link operations and switching within subnets and the network layer handles the routing of packets between subnets.
The transport layer may be responsible for in-order packet delivery, partitioning, channel multiplexing, data segmentation and reassembly. In performing its functions, the transport layer may provide several services such as Reliable Connection (RC), Unreliable Connection (UC), Reliable Datagram (RD), Unreliable Datagram (UD), and Raw. In pure InfiniBand networks, the transport services may operate over an InfiniBand data-link fabric. However, when InfiniBand data-link fabric is not available, mixed-fabric networks may be formed where InfiniBand transport services operate atop the network and/or data link layers of non-InfiniBand networks. In that regard, the InfiniBand transport services may utilize the resources of ubiquitous network infrastructure like that of Ethernet and/or Internet Protocol (IP) networks.